Léopold Lambert: The first sentence is eloquent: “The Steel Competition seeks to understand the potential of an architecture of alterity by positioning a third-space between difference and the same by redefining ICE, or an Immigration and Custom Enforcement Facility to create a more Humanitarian Design of a Detention Center” (my emphasis). Language is important and the idea of creating a position that would neither be “different” or “the same” appears as a symptom of what Orwell calls “newspeak” in 1984 (1949): the encompassing of all truth discourses in one sentence to deactivate language’s signification and enforce the status quo.
When one reads further, the language of humanitarism begins to appear. We learn that 65.3 millions of people are currently displaced worldwide, and that “according to the UNHCR statistics, one person for every 113 is currently displaced from their communities because of conflict, resulting in the largest number of asylum-seekers looking for a better, safer life than ever recorded in history.” The next sentence then set the tone: “For the asylum-seeker or immigrant, the in-between grey area is where the question is being addressed: does this person or family have jurisdiction to be on another countries soil?”
Besides the inaccurate use of the term “jurisdiction” here (perhaps it was decided that using the word “rights” would have mobilized an imaginary of social struggles that would have not served the brief), we understand that despite the tragic reality that the figures just described, the hospitality of displaced people in countries that appear in the brief as independent in the reasons that triggered these displacements cannot be implemented, hence the need for the existence of detention centers. The last sentence of the brief finishes to crystallize the newspeak call for projects: “How can we look at the design of a Detention Center—a nonplace that exists between immigrant and citizenship, or difference and the same—as a way to architecturally humanize displacement?” More here.